


Never Hit Soft

by mobiusmobiles



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Haruno Sakura-centric, Mokuton User Haruno Sakura
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-27 06:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30118470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mobiusmobiles/pseuds/mobiusmobiles
Summary: The ‘blossoms’ of the Flower District who have no family name of their own are given the name Haruno. Sakura may not know exactly who her parents are but she has an idea of her ancestry. To be fair, Mokuton is kind of a big hint.
Comments: 45
Kudos: 168





	1. Enter: Haruno Sakura

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Several lines here are taken directly from canon. I’m not going to mark them specifically but I thought I should mention that they’re there.

Sakura is focused enough on her book that she doesn’t actually notice Naruto putting an eraser in the door until it’s landing on their new sensei’s head. After several hours of waiting on him to show up, Sakura does not have any sympathy for him. 

“My first impression of you: you’re a bunch of idiots,” the man says and Sakura silently seethes. She doesn’t exactly have a high opinion of him, either. Still, she places her bookmark and follows him to the roof.

“Alright, why don’t you introduce yourselves?” their sensei says once they’re all sitting. 

“Why don’t you go first?” Sakura says. She doesn’t trust this man not to run off without even telling them his name if they let him.

“Me? I’m Hatake Kakashi. Things I like and things I hate, hmm, I don’t feel like telling you that. My dreams for the future, I never really thought about it. As for my hobbies, I have lots of hobbies.”

Her other new teammates give introductions that are equally bizarre, if slightly more informative. Naruto, at least, seems nice enough but Sakura is starting to get the feeling that he’s the only one on this team who is. 

“I’m Haruno Sakura,” she says when it’s her turn, “I like dango and I dislike bitter foods. My hobby is reading, I guess. My dream is to be a combat-type jounin.”

Kakashi doesn’t seem to care much about their introductions and that idea is only reinforced when he spends the next several minutes trying to scare them about a test tomorrow before sending them on their way.

Sakura stops to buy some ration bars on her way home. She doesn’t know exactly what Kakashi means by survival training but it can’t hurt to be prepared, especially if it involves spending the night in the forest like most of the Academy’s survival training.

When she gets home, Sakura kisses her fingers and presses them to the drawing by the door without even looking at it before going to prepare dinner. If she can’t eat tomorrow morning, she’s going to eat extra tonight.

\---

Sakura wakes with laughter still in her ears and tears on her pillow, like most days. Her alarm hasn’t gone off yet but she figures she’s probably not getting anymore sleep tonight so she gets ready and heads to the training field.

Sakura has been stretching for about half an hour when Sasuke shows up.

“Good morning,” Sakura says.

Sasuke scoffs and sits against a tree. Sakura hopes it’s just that he’s not a morning person but she saw his introduction yesterday so the hope is small.

Naruto gets there about ten minutes later.

“Good morning,” she says again.

Naruto looks around for a moment and then points to himself. When Sakura nods, Naruto yells, “Oh, yeah, good morning to you too, Sakura! Hey, what’s that you’re doing?”

Sakura looks down at herself for a moment, confused, and says, “I’m stretching.”

“Why?” 

Sakura is even more confused as she asks, “Are you asking why I’m stretching now or why I stretch in general?”

“Eh, both I guess,” Naruto says.

Sakura gives him a long look but she starts in on a lecture on how muscles work and the benefits of stretching. She has to stop several times for Naruto to ask questions but by the end of it he’s so excited he’s bouncing on his feet.

“Hey, you should show me some of these stretches, yeah?” Naruto says.

Sakura smiles a little. It’s been a long time since someone listened so attentively before. 

“Okay, but we’ll have to start out with the basics. If you haven’t stretched before then you probably can’t do the same ones that I do.”

Naruto nods and he still looks excited so Sakura leads him through a very basic version of the stretches that she’s been doing. Naruto is very enthusiastic about them so he ends up falling over several times but he gets back up every time so they make it to the end.

When they’re done, Sakura looks for a spot to sit in and chooses one under a tree nearby. Naruto is still standing in the same spot he was before when she sits so she pats the spot next to her in invitation and he runs over. Sakura had brought a book in case they were left waiting by their sensei again but she’d allowed herself to be a little hopeful so she also has her paper shogi board.

“Ne, Naruto, do you know how to play shogi?” she asks and predictably he shakes his head. His eyes light up though when Sakura says, “Would you like to learn?”

Sakura takes out the paper she’s drawn the board on and the small packet of strips that she uses instead of pieces. She looks speculatively over at Sasuke until he looks back at her and she calls, “Do you want to play shogi with us?”

Sasuke scoffs again so Sakura turns back to Naruto and starts explaining the rules to him. He asks even more questions than he did with her lecture on muscles but he does actually seem to be getting the rules, somewhat. It takes almost an hour to explain everything and answer his questions to the best of her ability but by the end Kakashi still isn’t there so she and Naruto start a game.

Naruto has to ask questions a few times to remind himself of the rules but it’s less than Sakura thought it would be and he really is trying so she doesn’t mind. Sakura wins the first game but Naruto doesn’t seem to mind at all when she immediately asks if he wants to play again.

It’s another four games before Kakashi finally shows up and Naruto has lost all of them but he’s getting better and he keeps insisting that he’s really going to beat her the next game. It’s not actually a bad way to spend a morning, despite Kakashi’s tardiness.

“You’re late!” Naruto stands and yells as soon as Kakashi shows up.

Sakura gets to her feet as well, figuring their ‘survival exercise’ is finally going to start.

“Sorry about that,” Kakashi says, “a black cat crossed my path so I had to take the long way around.”

When Kakashi has explained his test and the time limit, Sakura has a bad feeling about this. She has to ask anyway.

“Sensei,” she says, “you only have two bells.”

Kakashi’s eye curves up in a smile that is so false Sakura’s teeth hurt. The bad feeling gets much worse from there.

\---

Sakura feels a little bit bad for using Naruto’s attack as a distraction but she figures if she really does get the bells, she can always give one to him. She’s been inching her chakra strings across the field towards Kakashi for about half a minute and she’s very close when he suddenly disappears from the field. 

“Sakura, behind you,” he says and it’s obviously a trap but it’s not like leaving him at her back would be better so she turns.

\---

Sota is standing in front of her and Sakura can’t breathe.

“Imouto,” he says, “when did you get so big?”

A thousand apologies are on the tip of her tongue but Sakura can’t seem to say any of them.

“Where have you been?”

Sakura can’t even get out a squeak.

“Why didn’t you look for me?”

He’s so close.

“Sakura? Why won’t you say anything?”

Sakura reaches for him but she finds he’s just out of her reach. She tries to move to him but her feet are sunk into the earth. 

There is only one word Sakura can say and she knows it will take her away from him again. She stares at him for a moment and re-memorizes his face. 

“Kai,” she says and finds herself alone in the trees again. A few tears fall but Sakura wipes them away and heads back to the clearing. Kakashi wants them to come after him with the intent to kill? Well, she can definitely do that now.

Sakura doesn’t find Kakashi in the clearing, though. Instead, she finds Naruto hanging by his foot from a tree. She disables the traps underneath for him and helps him down.

“Sakura! Sakura! I found the lunches! We can go eat them while Sensei is busy with the bastard!” Naruto yells in her face once he’s down.

“You’d rather have lunch than pass the test?” Sakura asks. It’s harsher than what she would usually say but any patience she has is gone now. If Naruto thinks his lunch is more important than his hitai-ate, she won’t stop him but she doesn’t think he’s actually thought of it that way.

Naruto looks torn for a moment but he shakes his head and follows her when she takes off. Sakura explains the outline of a plan along the way. Naruto will attack with those solid clones from earlier but this time she’ll be among them with her chakra strings.

\---

Sakura’s chakra gets within an inch of the bells before the timer goes off. Sasuke ends up tied to a stump because, apparently, he’d spent the last several minutes buried in the ground while at least Sakura and Naruto were still attacking. Kakashi offers them another chance after lunch and warns them not to feed Sasuke before disappearing again.

Sakura immediately offers Sasuke a bite of her food.

“Sakura?” Naruto says.

“We don’t stand a chance against Kakashi and he knows it. I’m not going to be cruel to someone just so he can play stupid mind games with us,” Sakura says.

Sasuke stares at her for several seconds and then nods and eats the bite she offered him. Naruto looks briefly torn but he nods and offers a bite of his own food as well. It’s too bad that they won’t pass. Sakura thinks she’d actually enjoy being on a team with Naruto.

Kakashi suddenly appears in front of them.

“You,” he says and pauses for several moments before finishing, “pass.”

Apparently, it was a mind game but it wasn’t the kind Sakura thought it was. She feels herself relax a little, especially when he tells them why he set it up like this. She thinks she can get behind the team first philosophy he’s pushing.

Kakashi fakes another smile with his one visible eye and then disappears again. Sakura thinks abrupt endings to meetings is something she’ll probably just have to get used to.

“Well,” she says as she cuts off the rope on Sasuke’s hands, “he’s definitely a weirdo.”

“Yeah,” Naruto says, sniffling, “but he’s kinda cool.”

Sasuke scoffs again and Sakura is starting to wonder if he has a speech impediment or something. They all look around at each other awkwardly for a moment.

“Do you guys want to go get dango?” she asks.

Naruto cheers and Sasuke rolls his eyes but he doesn’t actually leave so Sakura grabs their hands and heads towards her favorite stand. If she’s going to spend an awkward afternoon trying to turn them into an actual team, she at least deserves dango.

Sasuke leaves after about half an hour and he’s only said maybe three sentences the whole time but Sakura figures they can work up to actual conversations with him. 

Naruto stays another hour with Sakura and even then she’s the one who suggests they head home for the day. He still insists on walking her back to her apartment. Sakura waves him off when they get to the building but Naruto’s goodbyes follow her up to her door.

Sakura walks in and kisses her fingers before pressing them to the drawing by the door. She stares at it for a moment, even though she knows it by heart. It’s signed in the corner with blocky letters, the best ones in the world.

Sota.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In general, I love comments of all kinds including short, long, concrit, questions, and just singular emojis, so feel free to give me any feedback you're willing to share.


	2. The Wayward Sensei Returns

Sakura had thought that, maybe, after he passed them, Kakashi would be slightly more bearable. This, it turns out, is not true.

Kakashi shows up several hours late every morning, takes them to get a D-rank mission, and then disappears as soon as it’s over. He doesn’t teach them anything. He doesn’t even help on the missions, even though he gets paid for them as well. It’s enough to make Sakura want to pull her hair out.

The first two days of this behavior, Sakura gives him the benefit of the doubt and doesn’t exert herself in the mornings in case they do some kind of training later on. The third day, Sakura has had enough. She gets to the field and does her customary stretches but she immediately transitions after into kata. Naruto enthusiastically joins her but after the first few minutes, Sakura has to stop him.

“Naruto,” she asks, “what are you doing?”

“I’m training with you,” he says, confused but still grinning.

“No, no, I get that but why are you doing it that way?” 

“What way?” Naruto asks and Sakura demonstrates what it is that seems odd about his kata but Naruto just shrugs and says, “This is how I was taught to do it.”

This, combined with the ignorance of stretching yesterday, is putting a sinking feeling in Sakura’s chest.

“Ne, Naruto, do you think I could show you the way I do things instead? I think it will work out better for you.”

Naruto is enthusiastic as he agrees and for the next few hours he slowly goes through his kata as Sakura watches to correct movements or positions. By the end, it actually looks decent, although it’s still not fast.

Sasuke doesn’t actually help with the corrections but he does his own kata a few feet away so it’s almost like a team exercise. At least, until Kakashi shows up and interrupts them for another D-rank.

\---

The next day, Sakura shows up with a bag full of notebooks and a plan. When she and Naruto finish their stretches, she sits next to her bag and pats the ground next to her instead of moving into katas again.

“So, I don’t know why it happened and I don’t need to know, but clearly there are some holes in what you learned at the Academy,” she begins. Naruto shrugs but Sakura isn’t really asking a question so she takes it as agreement. “Okay, well, I brought some of my Academy notebooks with me today and I thought maybe we could go over some of the really important stuff, just to make sure. I have a list of what I think are probably the really important things here, do you know how to do these things?” Sakura says as she hands him the list she’d made.

Naruto looks unusually hesitant as he says, “Yeah, yeah, I know this stuff.”

“All of it?” Sakura asks.

“Yeah, of course,” Naruto says. Sakura stares at him for a few seconds until he throws his hands up in the air and yells, “Fine, I don’t know!”

“What don’t you know?” Sakura asks.

“I don’t know if I know them,” Naruto mumbles.

“Oh,” Sakura says, “are my descriptions confusing? I thought they were pretty straightforward.”

“I can’t read them,” Naruto mumbles and he’s looking at the ground as he says it. It’s probably the most subdued Sakura has seen him and she doesn’t like it.

“Okay,” Sakura says, “I guess that’s where we need to start.”

Naruto looks up at her and there is something very fragile about his expression. Sakura has a lot of skills but comforting people is not one of them. She reaches out and awkwardly pats his hand twice before getting out the blank notebook she’d brought for him to take notes in.

“Well, I guess we start with the basics. If you already know any of this tell me but it’s okay if you don’t. It’s way better to learn now than when we need it for a mission or something. You can ask any questions you want, too,” Sakura says and she looks very intently at Naruto until he nods.

They spend about an hour on characters before Naruto starts to get visibly frustrated. Sakura stands and holds out her hand to help him up.

“We’re not done with this, though, are we?” Naruto asks as he takes her hand, brow wrinkled.

“No but we can come back to it later. Let’s run through the kata again,” Sakura says.

Sasuke has been running through kata since he arrived so Sakura and Naruto move closer to his area before beginning. By the time Kakashi arrives, Naruto is remembering the corrections well enough that Sakura can run through her kata with them. 

\---

Sakura’s mornings start to fall into a schedule: stretching, reading practice, and then running through kata with Naruto as she talks about something he missed at the Academy with regular interruptions for Naruto to ask questions. She starts with chakra theory and has gotten to elemental chakra before anything significant changes.

“So earth chakra is weak to lightning chakra and-” Sakura says before she’s cut off by a question. For the first time, though, it’s not Naruto asking.

“Lightning is absorbed by the ground so how can earth be weak to lightning?” Sasuke asks quietly.

Sakura is thrown off-guard so she probably ends up going too deep into the theory, talking about disruption patterns and fulgurites. Naruto is definitely confused. Still, at the end of her explanation, Sasuke nods at her. Sakura has to take a moment to get over her surprise.

“Okay, so we were talking about the cyclical hierarchy elemental chakra,” she says and continues on from her previous point. This time, though, she makes a point to look at Sasuke every once in a while to see if he’s following along. To her continued surprise, he stays engaged the whole time. 

For the first time, Sakura is almost disappointed when Kakashi shows up.

\---

Even once they leave the Haruno House, pretty much all of the kids who grew up there spend a lot of time in the Flower District looking for familiar features and in this, Sakura has been no different. Even while she was in the Academy, Sakura would spend a couple of afternoons a week sweeping or cooking in one of the brothels so she could watch the women there for any resemblance. She never found any resemblance but it means that she knows the women working in the district and many of them are at least passingly fond of her. So, when Sakura walks into a few houses asking about a gray-haired ninja with one eye, she gets answers.

All of this means that when Kakashi walks up to his favorite house almost three weeks after passing Team 7, Sakura is waiting outside for him.

Kakashi’s eye widens when he sees her and he stops in his tracks. “Sakura?” he says.

“Hi, Sensei. I think we need to talk,” Sakura answers. Kakashi looks between the door and her for a few moments but eventually he sighs and agrees to follow her to a nearby tea shop. They sit down and Sakura waits for their order to appear before she begins.

“You said that you believe people who abandon their teammates are worse than trash?” she opens with.

“Yes, I did,” Kakashi says, raising his visible brow.

“I find that hard to believe considering your behavior the past few weeks,” Sakura says. She has never particularly believed in pulling her punches. She doesn’t wait for Kakashi to respond before she continues, “Do you even know that Naruto couldn’t do a proper kata when you passed him? Do you know where the gaps in any of our knowledge are? Do you have any plan to fix them?”

“You seem to have very few gaps and with you helping the others-” Kakashi says before Sakura cuts him off.

“I have very few gaps?” she says, incredulous, “There are so many things I don’t know! I know more than Naruto thanks to how ridiculously lacking his education was but I don’t know nearly enough for the field. That’s where you’re supposed to come in! Teaching myself, much less my teammates, isn’t supposed to be my job, it’s supposed to be yours! And you’ve abandoned it!”

“I’m trying to give you time to bond as a team-” Kakashi says but Sakura cuts him off again.

“And we couldn’t do that with you there? Are you part of this team or aren’t you?” Sakura says, finally getting to the crux of her argument.

Kakashi is silent for several moments before he raises his brow again and says, “Well, you don’t mince words, do you?”

Sakura glares right back at him and says, “That wasn’t an answer. I’ve been patient. I’ve given you time to get your act together on your own but I don’t have forever. We’re going to be sent out of Konoha eventually and if you don’t start actually teaching us before then we aren’t going to survive the first enemy encounter.”

Kakashi deflates so quickly that Sakura almost feels bad for him. She thinks back on the past few weeks, though, and the almost-regret evaporates. He nods eventually but Sakura waits for a verbal response. She can’t afford to let him be vague about this. She’s learned her lesson.

“Fine. We’ll start actively training as a team tomorrow,” he says eventually.

“Good,” Sakura says and waits for Kakashi to get up and leave. When he pours himself another cup of tea instead, she raises an eyebrow and says, “Didn’t you have plans for tonight?”

Kakashi tries to play it cool but he chokes very slightly on his tea. “Maa, I think I’ll have to reschedule. And maybe find a different venue,” he says, finishing in a mumble.

“I don’t know, I think Chiharu is a perfectly nice ‘venue’,” Sakura says and grins when he gives her a very dry look. 

“Weren’t you just saying you had questions?” he asks.

“Ne, I was going to wait until training but if you’d rather talk about obscure chakra theory, I guess I can do that,” Sakura says before she launches into a long list of questions.

Judging by the way Kakashi keeps rubbing his temples, he’s not going to be any less tired tomorrow than he would have been with his original plans. Sakura finds she’s okay with that. As the one to kick him into gear, she deserves some time to ask questions without the others.

Kakashi is only one hour late to meet them the next morning. Naruto actually falls down in shock when he appears and accuses him of being an imposter.

Kakashi awkwardly rubs the back of his neck and says, “Training?” 

It’s definitely an improvement.


End file.
